Everyday Things We Know, But Do Not Understand

There are countless examples of everyday things we experience and know about, but do not understand. You shall see some of them here and find the reasons behind them.

Why does Music Touch the Heart?

Music is like an everyday thing for us. When we hear good music, whatever our mood maybe, the mood enhances. This is because listening to music directly influences the heart and then the brain. But how exactly just a beautiful sound touch our very heart?

Music is basically a combination of notes playing in a repeated sequence. We call this sequence as ‘beats’. And yes, the beats have a particular frequency. Every songs’ beats have different frequency and even different sections in songs can have variable beats. We know for a fact that even our heart ‘beats’. It is the primary function of the heart. The magic happens when the beat of the music coincide with the beat of the heart. This phenomenon is termed as ‘resonance’.

So, basically when you listen to music that coincides with the beating frequency of the heart, resonance occurs. When, resonance occurs, the work done by the system increases. During resonance, the heart pumps more blood than usual. This is however well within the safe range. Blood transported to the brain (which is full of arteries) increases due to this. This enhances whatever mood you are in.

If you are sad, you may start crying. On the other hand, if you are happy, you may start dancing or singing along the tune without a care. Or let’s just say, If you feel romantic, you may feel the urge to convey your love to you spouse/partner.

What Causes Menstrual Pain?

We all know for a fact that women face a lot of pain during their menstrual cycle. This is the reason why they do not remain in a good mood. During menstruation, the body dispels unfertilized eggs. Ovaries then make new eggs to replace the previous ones. This happens in fairly regular intervals as it is also a systematic cycle.

The primary reason for pain (mostly in lower back region) is uterus’ contraction. During every menstrual cycle, the body prepares for a fertilized egg. It does so by making a uterus lining known as endometrium. If the egg remains unfertilized, the estrogen and progesterone hormone levels drop. The reason why women undergo a lot of mood swings and irritable behavior, is the sudden drop of the hormonal levels.

This is the basic indication to the body that the egg is unfertilized. This makes the body break the endometrium, as its cause now is redundant. A contracting action takes place to break endometrium. This action causes lower back and hip pain. The pain is also sometimes referred as mini-labor, as it is comparable to the fraction of labor pain.

The pain also makes a cause for concern. But, as you can see from the explanation, the pain is completely natural. Hence, worrying about the pain is meaningless. Avoiding food with caffeine and salts and regular exercise can help in reducing the pain. If the pain is more than usual, you can also get a prescribed medicine.

Dreams

When we sleep, we often see images or sequence of images, which may be beautiful, scary or outright weird. This is what we call as dreams. Dreams make us feel different sensations and emotions via images or sequence of images. They often occur when the body is in the mid stage of its sleep.

Dreams are nothing but manifestations of our own subconscious minds. The images playing in the sleep, are from the memories, from deep corners of the brain. These memories are either from frequently or rarely accessed memories. If you see a face of a strange person that you may not recognize consciously, chances are that you may have seen the person once in your life and you brain might have stored it for later use.

However, dreams aren’t selective with memories. It is possible that two (or more) completely unrelated memories blend together to make dream sequence. Dreams often is a blend of multiple people, locations and experiences. Studies show most common emotion experienced in a dream is anxiety. However dreams’ emotions also include joy, fear, isolation, rage and happiness.

Many people believe dreams allow repressed parts of mind to live out. Even when someone has a nightmare, it is mainly because of fear we have deep down in our sub-conscious mind. In dreams, the world is your own and it is your to experience it completely. Some study also suggests that the reason we cannot mainly remember the dream is that by the time we wake up, the memories causing the dream, goes back to the corners of the brain.

Why Challenging your Belief May Hurt You?

We all have some firm beliefs in life. The storage of these fact and faiths in our brain is very concrete. We cannot fathom this faith to be wrong. But sometime or the other, we may understand that what we believe is wrong. However, we really have a hard time to digest the fact. The fact that what we so strongly believe is wrong. This hurts us and we cannot understand anything else. We try to ignore the reality in favor of our belief. We may even take offense.

This is because when we strongly believe something, the neurons in the brain storing these belief gets stronger. This means that the bonds between the neurons in which the belief resides, gets stronger. The stronger the belief, the stronger the bond. These primarily reside in a region in the brain called amygdala (a pair of almond-shaped areas, symmetric and near to the center of the brain)

Studies suggest that the amygdala primarily perceives (in picture) anxiety and threat when invoked or challenged. This is the reason why some people have an absolute meltdown, when somebody challenges their beliefs. The meltdowns however, are extreme cases. In these cases, the bond between the neurons may break, resulting in such a situation. This is called as Cognitive Dissonance. As a result, in order to convince someone to leave their belief (if it is wrong), you always need to gradually make them understand you perspective. In a calm and cool fashion.

Yawning..

Yawning is an involuntary action of the human body. It is the action of inhaling more amount of oxygen and often associates with tiredness or boredom. In most adults, commonly, yawning occurs just before/right after sleeping. It may also occur during a long stretch of tedious activity. When we yawn, our eardrums stretch a bit. It is the reason why we are unable to hear things while yawning.

Sleepy Girl

Other than boredom and tiredness, yawning can also associate with sleepiness, stress and even in some cases, hunger. one of the probable cause for yawning is blood’s excessive demand of carbon dioxide. As a result, we yawn, inhaling a large amount of oxygen and converting that oxygen to carbon dioxide.

Yawning generally indicates that brain has only 20% of its battery left and that it needs recharging (sleep). The act of yawning often accompanies with stretching of arms and legs, which again is involuntary.

Many studies have proved yawning to be contagious. But when you yawn a contagious yawn (after seeing someone other yawn), it does not mean you need more sleep. Involuntarily catching other people’s yawn, often suggests an act of emotional connection. It is as similar as smiling back when someone smiles at you.

How do Children Adapt to Technology Easily?

We all see the younger generation, using technology with such ease, it baffles us. People above the age of 40, usually have a hard time dealing with newly invented technology. Children are usually provided with products that are of new generation, as a result in their growing stages they spend their time playing with it.

As the brain of the child develops, so does their skills to use and understand technology. The brain actually grows a lot during the childhood. Today, technology exposed to children, is in this brain growth stage itself. As a result, they learn all the things related to technology easily. The credit also goes to the designers of the technology, whose ideas make the use of these devices easier for the children.

The adults on the other hand, have their brains fully developed and accustomed to things we already use and know. As a result, we cannot learn to use the new technology as easily as children can. Researchers shows, accustoming to new technology is usually difficult for people who are above the age of 35. This is also one of the main reasons why a generation gap exists.

However, exposing the child with too much technology is beneficial or not, is a long ongoing debate. But we know that life without today’s technology is really difficult. The efficiency of children to learn technology is also boosted by the fact that in many areas, technology is used to make children learn new things. It is an integral part of school systems now. Children learn more about computers in their curriculum than they ever did before.